Lawyer links Strake to cancer potential

A lawyer suing to stop the Divine Strake explosion at the Nevada Test Site says the gigantic non-nuclear blast carries the potential to kick up old radioactive debris and cause cancer.

Citing the federal government's draft environmental assessment on the explosion, Robert Hager, of Reno, Nev., points out that federal officials now acknowledge that populated areas off the sprawling test site could be exposed to radiation.

The assessment says the radioactive exposure would be slight, but Hager isn't buying that.

Hager told the Deseret Morning News that he represents individual Western Shoshone Indians in Nevada, some Utah downwinders, the Winnemucca Indian Colony and the Timbisha Tribe of the Western Shoshone.

Radiation from nuclear tests carried out at the site in past decades would have fallen to the ground there. While some of the atomic particles were short-lived, others have half-lives stretching into decades.

"For the first time, the agencies admit that there are radionuclides in the soil that will become airborne, and that radioactivity will be transported by the mushroom cloud outside the test site, and that downwind populations may be exposed to radioactivity," Hager said in an e-mail.

He was citing a draft environmental analysis on Divine Strake, released in December. The analysis concluded that downwind residents would not be in danger.

The concern of some downwind residents is that radioactive material in the soil could become airborne if the Defense Threat Reduction Agency carries out the planned test, detonating up to 700 tons of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil. The test's announced purpose is to learn how to attack an enemy that is using hardened and deeply buried shelters.

The draft assessment acknowledges that the blast would cause radioactive material to be released. But it says the levels would be far lower than Environmental Protection Agency standards, which allow exposure of no more than 0.1 millirem.

The most radiation that a person could receive standing next to the test-site boundary is 0.006 to 0.007 millirem, it says, while off-site populated areas would have an exposure that was "two to five times lower still" than that. Exposure in a populated area would be "about 40 to 100 times lower than the 0.1-millirem level" set by the EPA, it says.

Hager challenged the science behind the government's exposure estimates as "flawed." His experts also say the modeling of where the radioactivity will be deposited is mere speculation, he added.